I’ve just returned from the place where, according to the poster seemingly written by Popeye, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits”, and, well, this time, I was thinking. And what I was thinking was this: “Do all Indians, and for all I know other subcontinentals, use only their left hand when they wipe?”
Because I can’t. I’m too right-handed. Well, I suppose I could if, say, someone said to me, “Thornhill, use your left hand on every occasion for the rest of your life, else we’ll do something terrible to your family, like make them watch Michael Moore films every day for a month and write 100 times each day ‘Michael Moore does make serious documentaries, and so what if he’s an opportunistic hypocrite, so would I be if I had all his cash’.”
As you can probably appreciate, then, I might be against ownership of hand guns, but I do, perhaps in a rather old fashioned and non-PC way, take my responsibilities as a husband and father, indeed, as head of the household, seriously, and I would never, ever subject my loved ones to that kind of indignity, even at the cost of developing sciatica because of having to switch hands. (And not just hands, you know - arms and shoulders…nerve tissue, ligaments and tendons…god knows what else too.)
So is this just a rural myth - a reflection of the way we “orientalise” our cousins with skin less pale than us, a reflection of the middle-class tendency to sentimentalise and romanticise those who are poorer than us, while secretly being pretty okay about the status quo, 'cos it’s nice to get your trainers and stuff cheap - or is it true?
Would Ed Zotti/SDSAB/Mods/Admin, AKA “Cecil Adams”, please, please investigate this sticky problem? It would be so easy to wash our hands of it, but what purpose would that serve in the war on ignorance that Cec has waged so manfully for all these years?